Doctor Who: Season 9 Episode 5 Liveblog

The Girl Who Died

Doctor Who, Series 9 Episode 5 of 12

By the Tripwire LiveBlog Team

I’m a Cyber-Viking, and this is my friend from Easter Island…

Or “The One With Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams.” And Vikings. And killer space warriors. This would be more impressive if the liveblog team had a) ever watched Game of Thrones, or b) knew who Maisie Williams was. As neither condition is true this isn’t quite so exciting for us as it may be for other people. We just hope it’s not the start of the kind of “stars of geekdom” franchise swapping action that you see in the States, when you’re often not sure what program you’re watching because the producers of drafted in a fan favourite from another show. Surely Mr Moffatt wouldn’t do anything that cheap, or indeed, cheesy. The last two-parter was one of the best Doctor Who stories seen for some time, and thankfully fairly low on the hysteria monitor. We like Vikings, and killer space monsters too, and we’re sure Maisie Williams is a perfectly fine young lady, so we’re looking forward to tonight…

20.25

Zoom into Clara in a space suit. Much hysteria. Doctor rescues her, they land somewhere, have argument about time travelling and the awesome responsibility of it. Vikings turn up. Cue credits….

Doctor and Clara are taken prisoner by Vikings who exercise rare good taste by breaking the sonic shades into 2 pieces. Ah, here is Maisie, greeting the Vikings, and giving the Doctor what could only be described as an old-fashioned look. The Dr points out the deficiencies of having a God. He asks if they’ve ever seen Odin. Q appearance of Odin in the sky. A bunch of what can only be described as Easter Island heads in robot form beam down and start stealing Vikings. The Doctor suggests to Clara they don’t interfere. Clara interferes, and her Maisie get beamed up to what is fairly obviously an alien spaceship. I know her name is not Maisie. I just don’t know what it is.

20.35

Valhalla, here, takes the form of a type of metal butcher’s freezer thing. Cocky warrior gets zapped by lasers, wall starts pushing everyone into the lasers, Clara and smart girl jam the thing up, come face to face with Odin.

Doctor is back in the village, convincing the remaining villagers that the fake odin is fake, suceeds pretty well, convinces everyone they’ve been raided.

Back in ‘Valhalla’ the evil odin is explaining his evil plan. He’s putting the vikings in a big old juicer and drinking their testosterone and adrenaline. Yeah. Clara gives him the willies with the half of the sonic sunglasses and her spacesuit. He challenges her to a contest, his deadliest warrior vs theirs. Yeah, seems like a bad idea.

The Doctor is trying to talk the villagers out of fighting in the ultimate fighting contest. They are vikings, so this is not going well. But fortunately, the doctor speaks baby, and interprets a crying baby for the vikings, telling everyone how afraid the crying baby is.

It seems to work.

More baby speech interpretation goes on outside with the Doctor and Clara. Babies are pretty poetic it turns out. The Doctor decides to stay and not run off (I must have missed him saying he should run off) and the baby magically stops crying.

20.45

The Doctor begins training the non-viking Vikings. He gives them all funny nicknames, doesn’t give them real swords, etc., etc. One is afraid of blood, one doesn’t follow orders, all endearing character traits. Brief montage, followed by a short bitching session between the Doctor and Clara. “But Doctor we have a duty of care etc., etc.” the same argument there is every single episode at this point.

Maisie is making puppets, making up some theatre about the fight to come. The Doctor watches, creepily. They begin having a deep, emotional conversation about how weird she is but how weird everyone is and how the Doctor shouldn’t mock all the crap Vikings.

20.50

Yet more Baby action. Yes, Baby, because the baby is now a main character. The Doctor understands something the baby is yowling about “fire in the water”. It has something to do with the boathouse. Now the Doctor is all pumped up about something. Oh, it’s eels. He’s pumped up about electric eels the Vikings have been keeping in buckets.

Now they’re going to win, says the Doctor. Using the eels. They’re A-teaming something really, really, hard. It’s a montage again. There’s a puppet and an anvil involved.

20.55

Refridgeratortrons Attack!

Shootout at the OK Village, and the Refridgeratortrons are here with fake Odin. Everyone’s dancing and having a good old time in a barn. Odin is not happy about it. The Doctor is assuming he works on predator logic, and won’t kill unarmed civilians. Turns out he’s wrong, and Odin is fixin’ to attack.

Luckily, things are getting all eely. They electrify the Refridgerons and nick their weapons with an electromagnet. They also yank off their helmets, revealing that they’re not robots at all, but horribly gribbly monsters.

The Doctor scampers off with Maisie and one of the helmets. The Doctor reverses the polarity of the neutron flow (it’s a reference you see). Maisie says she’s not sure if she can do something, Doctor says she can. She does. A Maisie controlled sea serpent busts in through the barn door, spooking the evil aliens so they teleport off.

Evil Odin sees through the trickery, revealing that it’s just a boat and some puppetry. But the Doctor has an ulterior plan. He recorded the whole thing, revealing the aliens to be total cowards. He blackmails them to leave with threats to upload the footage (overdubbed with the Benny Hill theme) to the space internet.

21.00

Everyone is celebrating after the departure of the aliens, but oh no! Tragedy: Maisie is dead for some reason. Well, the reason is heart failure, but it’s not clear why. Well, the reason why is that she got plugged into an alien’s hat and that killed her, yeah.

The Doctor has sodded off to be emo.

He’s having a bit of a shout about how shit it is being a Timelord and how sad he is all the time. It’s really self-referential.

But suddenly! He sees his reflection and babbles a bit about how he knows why he gave himself this face. There are some clips of David Tennant. I don’t remember the episode he’s referencing but I’m sure it’s very clever. [It’s the Season 4 Episode The Fires of Pompeii which featured P Capaldi as Caecilius, who gets, well, burned to death in Pompeii. In that episode Tennant’s Doctor had a right fit about not changing the future. This will lead to trouble, mark my words… – Cleanup Ed.]

He shouts “I’M THE DOCTOR, AND I SAVE PEOPLE” for the 600th time this season and dashes off.

21.05

There was a medical kit inside the alien’s hat. He uses it to revive Maisie. But he also gives her a second medical kit, says she’ll need to give it to someone in the future.

Walking away, the Doctor is back to being emo. Says the medical kit will possibly prevent her from ever dying. It’s implied the second medical kit is for someone she cares about in the future, so they can be immortal too. But the Doctor says she will forever be… A HYBRID! DUN DUN DUUUN.

This is followed by a pretty nice little sequence of time passing quickly around Maisie while she stays the same. Then she makes an evil face and an explosion happens behind her. DUN DUN DUUUUUN!

NEXT WEEK!

We’re the dandy highwaymen, compelling your attention (and Maisie is back!).

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